Some weeks back one of our New Labour MP’s, Anne Snelgrove, asked one of her constituents how she thought the government was handling the global crisis. In response to a comment about this being the result of deregulation the MP told the astonished constituent that Britain was the most regulated country in Europe!
Today’s Guardian reports on the hearing before the US Congress of the great five hedge fund leaders. Defending their industry against the dreaded threat of regulation they more or less threatened the US government with taking all their jobs over to…London.
“It breaks my heart when I go to Canary Wharf and I look at thousands and thousands of jobs in London (this was before the crash, of course) in the derivatives market which belong in America.”
The reason they came to Britain was obviously because we are “the most regulated country in Europe”.
In a column in the local paper recently, Snelgrove referred to “spivs” in the City (that is the great ‘innovators’ that Gordon Brown fell in love with). Yet here we have some spivs threatening to come to Britain precisely because it is the most under-regulated country in Europe. Only last year Snelgrove’s great leader announced in a speech to the City big-wigs that they had ushered in a “new Golden Age” of the City of London. As they say, politicians have short memories.
Martin Wicks 